wback, and had besides a defect of idiosyncrasy in a certain dryness
and heaviness allied with, and partly resulting from, a too close
adherence to Latin forms. Montaigne again, like Rabelais, deliberately
refuses to be bound by the mere requirements of argument, and expatiates
into all sorts of digressions, partaking of the other style, the style
of description. If any one will take the famous passage of Descartes
already referred to (the passage in which he describes how being in
winter quarters, with nothing to do and sitting all day long by a warm
stove, he started the train of thought which ended or began in _Cogito
ergo sum_), and, having a good acquaintance with the three authors just
mentioned, will imagine how the same facts and arguments would have
appeared in their language, he will not find it difficult to realise the
difference. The grotesque by-play and the archaic vocabulary of
_Gargantua_, the garrulous digression and anecdote of the _Essays_, are
not more strikingly absent than the jejune scholasticism which is the
worse side of Calvin's grave and noble style. The author does not think
it necessary to attract his readers with ornament, nor to repel them
with dry and barren marshalling of technicalities. All is simple,
straightforward, admirably clear, but at the same time the prose is
fluent, modulated, harmonious, and possesses, if not the grace of
superadded ornament, those of perfect proportion and unerring choice of
words.

As a prose writer Descartes is generally compared to his contemporary,
and in some sort predecessor, Balzac, and his advantage over the author
of the _Socrate Chretien_ is stated to lie chiefly in the superiority of
his matter. This is not quite the fact. Balzac had, indeed, aimed at the
simplicity and classical perfection of Descartes, but he had not
attained it; he still has much of the quaintness of Montaigne, though it
must be remembered that in comparisons of this kind censure bestowed on
the authors compared is relative not positive, and that Descartes could
no more have written the _Essays_ than Montaigne the _Discours_.
Descartes has almost entirely discarded this quaintness, which sometimes
passed into what is called in French _clinquant_, that is to say, tawdry
and grotesque ornament. It is a peculiarity of his that no single
description of his sentences fully describes their form. They are always
perfectly clear, but they are sometimes very long. Their length,
however,